Smart antennas are widely utilized in wireless communication systems. In contrast to a traditional antenna, which has a single fixed beam pattern, the smart antenna may dynamically generate multiple beam patterns. Each such beam pattern can be pointed towards a particular user equipment and the beam patterns may be adapted to follow the particular user equipment as he moves. The smart antenna technologies may greatly increase the signal gain of the targeted user equipment and reduce the interference to other user equipment using the same channel.
Beam-forming is a key feature in communication systems today, and an operator thereof may enable and disable the beam-forming feature for particular cells or carrier frequencies. It can however be difficult to optimize the use of the beam-forming feature so as to provide the best possible performance for as many users as possible. For example, the use of beam-forming for user equipment moving at high speed suffers from limited tracking speed. The use of beam-forming for user equipment being “out-of-sight” from a base station suffers from the limited speed of beam-forming and it is thus difficult to decide whether or not to use beam-forming in e.g. urban areas. For these users the beam-forming gain is much lower than expected and if used, increases the interference towards other user equipment.
Manual drive tests may be performed, wherein a car is driven around to collect user equipment measurements in a cell of the communication system. However, although such manual test drives provide a more accurate basis for the decision on whether or not to use the beam-forming feature they are time-consuming as well as expensive and still only provides a limited picture of the user performance.